Overview
Entrant:
Anthony Hōete, University of Auckland
Category:
05. Innovative Timber Manufacturing & Technology Award
Photographed by:
Anthony Hōete, Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake
Key team members:
Anthony Hōete, Jeremy Treadwell, Ngāti Ira o Waioweka, Alistair Cattanach, Red Stag, Harken NZ Chandlery, Rāwhiti East Coast Scaffolding
Whare Mīmirū (2024) revitalises a traditional Māori construction practice endangered by colonisation.
Based on boat building, Māori once lashed their timber structures together. Like the trimming of the sails, mīmiro was almost tent-like and pulled whare into the ground. As such, pre-European whare were closer in appearance to Fale, with arched, not gabled, roof forms. Such a whare had heke (rafters) that were adzed, curved, not straight, to be pre-cambered.
Whare Mīmirū incorporates the traditional Māori construction technology of post-tensioning, known as mīmiro, meaning 'to lash together'. This technology was first evidenced in the archaeology of Kohika, a late Māori (1700AD) lake village preserved in a wetland. This excavation showed that Māori post-tensioning technology predated that described in the 1928 patent of the pioneering French engineer Eugène Freyssinet. The key components of mīmiro were: double-curvature heke (pre-cambered hemispherical roof beams) with a teremu (a tenon) fitted into inclined poupou (posts) housing a rua whetū joint (a sophisticated semi-circular socket-joint, or mortise, that frequently worked with a compression shoulder), a large kaho (purlin) all lashed together by a substantial tauwhenua (rope) that traversed the tāhuhu (a massive triangular horizontal ridge beam) of the whare and secured with eyelets in the poupou.
With funding from the former Earthquake Commission, Whare Mīmirū is effectively an 'earthquake machine' that relocates the traditional knowledge of mīmiro into a contemporary seismic setting. Thus Mīmiro, to lash a whare, + Rū, earthquake, = Mimirū, a seismically resilient timber structure. This project was not about the conservation of traditional pre-European materials but about updating a Māori construction technique by incorporating technological innovations previously unavailable. And then to apply this to a full-scale proof-of-concept portal, which could be assessed for seismic resilience via a snap-back test involving four jeeps. This project included mass timber technologies (e.g., double-curved glulam heke, poupou, and tāhuhu by RedStag), as well as sailing technologies (e.g., carbon-fibre, aluminium, and S/S winch grinders, clutch jammers, block swivels, and double-braided polyester ropes by Harken NZ chandlery).
Tāne-Mahuta is the Māori god of the forest and stands at the centre of the Māori creation story with a whare made from timber elements hewn from his forest. The whare mīmirū sits within a whakapapa of highly flexible, lashed, lightweight, breathing structures in Māori architecture. Its form, performance, and cosmological functions rely on properties that only timber and plant-based fibres can provide. The integrity of a post-tensioned timber portal comes from pre-cambered timber compressive elements held together by a distributed tensile system, creating a reciprocal structure that allows movement and flexure.
Whare Mīmirū was erected by a community (Ngāti Ira o Waioweka), for a community project (the future ancestral whare Tānewhirinaki), within the community (on Ōpeke Marae). Timber is underpinning an architecture of social value. On-site testing by the Faculty of Engineering demonstrated that a traditional Māori construction technique, when combined with modern mass timber technology, could meet contemporary wind and seismic standards and thus be code-compliant. The future whare Tānewhirinaki will deploy the timber research of Whare Mīmirū.